iPhone announcement: January 2007
Android release: October 2008
Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010
Indeed it seems that Microsoft took their sweet time to rearchitect their OS, but these dates suggests Microsoft realized much earlier than 3 years later.
Microsoft was shipping PDAs (of which iPhone is an evolution of) since the 90s. I had a Casio E-95. It's about the same size as an iphone. It has a single button below the display at the bottom (same place as the home button on the original iPhone). It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons for apps (similar to an iPhone's 4x5 grid). What it doesn't have, it doesn't have capacitive touchscreen, it has resistive so it used a stylus, though I used my fingernail often). It doesn't have cellular service (but plenty did before iPhone shipped). Its UX is not optimized for touch as much as iOS. But it runs an OS, Win-CE, on a PDA so I'm not sure anything needed to be rearchitected rather than just deprecate the desktop UI widgets for more touch friendly alternatives (yea I know that's easier said than done but it's a tiny part of an OS vs all the rest).
Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.
From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be.
Blackberry, Palm, and Apple all realized that given hardware and interface limitations, a better solution was to cut the Gordian knot and strike a different balance between desktop and something else.
Honestly, any of the three had a shot at being Apple. Palm had Graffiti and really slick for the time OSs. Blackberry had iMessage of their own. But Apple had a more complete package + Apple fans + iTunes.
> From early Windows CE memories, Microsoft's mobile hubris always seemed to start from "desktop Windows is the best OS." Ergo, the closer to desktop Windows they could put on mobile devices, the happier people would be.
This insanity reached it's peak just before the iPhone introduction with Microsoft's "Ultra Mobile PC" handheld device initiative.
To be fair to Microsoft,* there was customer pull for “desktop everywhere”. I remember asking 20 years ago at a city council meeting why they planned to spend so much on Exchange/Outlook rather than, say, Netscape.
The answer was that the Netscape icons looked different from Microsoft’s so lack of training costs would make MS cheaper. Sounds like bullshit but back then there was enormous learned helplessness when it came to anything computerish. Walk to any desk in most companies and there would be a stack of books to explain it all.
One of the best things about the iPhone was that it jettisoned all that crap and acknowledged that people aren’t idiots. The stores still offered free “training” for the fearful.
* strange, I know, as they were rarely fair to others.
And then later on Microsoft shipped Windows 8 - which was a touch first interface on millions and millions of desktop computers.
I still remember the utter despair when non pro users didn't understand what was happening with the interface.
The feature parity minimizes how much better the iPhone was, even at launch when it was clearly rough around the edges. It’s like comparing a 1988 Hyundai with a Tesla Model S. The features are all the same: 4 doors, 4 seats, steering wheel, brake and gas pedals. But the experiences couldn’t be more different.
One thing Apple had was the political ability to iterate on the design. Remember that the original iphone had no apps, and no mobile data.
That made it look like an odd duck in the sea of computerphones, but what it had was a slick user interface completely designed around the capabilities of capacitive screens, and that took many years for the competition to even get close to.
Good user interfaces are truly hard, and Apple has always put it front and center, so it must have made sense for them.
Also, besides the form factor (pda/phone) there was - before the Win-CE - the mis-known Windows for Pen Computing (essentially Windows 3.11), I used to have a Compaq "laptop" that was actually a tablet (with detachable keyboard), the Compaq Concerto that was actually quite usable with the specific pen, whether that is to be seen as a precursor of the iPad/tablet or of the Microsoft Surface or similar, it came well before anything else (and lasted only a very brief time):
The Windows Phone 7 "tech stack" was based on the Windows CE kernel and, speaking as someone who worked on it briefly, it was a dumpster fire. It wasn't until Windows Phone 8 in 2012 that Microsoft put a real OS kernel on their phones the way Apple put Darwin on iPhones. Devices could not upgrade from 7 to 8 because they were essentially different operating systems.
For the customer though the difference was not that dramatic. My wife had a WP7 device and I liked it enough that I replaced my android phone with a WP8, and while it was clearly better than 7, it was not dramatically better. At the time the lack of backwards compatibility was baffling for the WP7 buyers I knew, and all of them switched to iphone or android after that because of being burned by that transition.
I had a similar experience when they went to WP10. While WP8 was a fast, stable and highly usable OS, WP10 was a dumpster fire (for me as a user, cannot talk about underpinnings). Constant crashes, slow, terrible battery life. This was a widely shared experience among WP10 users as far as I know. And on top of that there was another software transition that all but guaranteed no apps properly jumped to the new platform. Looking back on it I think jumping to WP10 instead of carefully incrementing WP8 was the big mistake, and rolling out WP8 without a way to make the transition easier on existing WP7 buyers was the lesser one.
I don’t think a perfect execution would have saved microsoft though: they would have always been third and it is pretty clear developers cannot support more than two mobile platforms properly. The app situation would have always been bad, and without all of the popular apps a smartphone is dead in the water.
I might say that Microsoft didn’t really rearchitect the mobile OS until Windows Phone 8 in November 2012, which was based on Windows NT. Windows 7 was, well a new skin on Windows CE is reductive, but CE was the kernel.
As if the 2.5 years delay to market wasn't enough, Microsoft also decided to invent a whole new UI paradigm for Windows Phone 7. I really want to know what went on when they made that decision.
The new UI paradigm was fantastic for users. That was never the problem with the Windows Phone. I'm not sure if you ever used one, but I loved it. It's problem was always the ecosystem. The device was fast even on low end hardware, yet felt fresh and productive. It got out of the way. I always felt the tabs were a couple of points too large. I never wrote an app for it so suspect it sucked.
On the phone, peoples social media was all integrated into one hub and while great for the user, it reduced the platforms to a transport layer - which did not appeal to them. Youtube was a big deal at the time, and didn't want their app on the new competitors platform. Microsoft wrote some, and they were taking offline. On the Windows phone, it would have been a few steps away from a storage platform.
Microsoft had a brand reputation problem at the time. Windows is what your parents used for work. Apple had an emotional connection of being fresh and hip. They had the iPod and people dancing in silhouette.
iTunes was available on Mac. You could run it on Windows, if you shut everything else down - the thing was a massive resource hog. I'm so scarred by it that even owning a Mac now I never user it.
The Zune app was a joy to use in comparison. I used Zune app for years without even owning a Zune. You had to use iTunes to sync your iPod. The older portable MP3 players were storage devices that you just copied files onto the device.
The end user experience was not the problem.
edit: some of this might be slightly inaccurate since I'm going from memory here. Happy to be corrected by someone who remembers better than I.
I had an iPhone at that point. I remember playing with Windows Phone 7 at a store and my gut feeling wasn't great about it.
Perhaps it was a combination of that text based tab control or it was the black & white + flat + text design they adopted for live tile and for the UI controls.
It's been a while, so it's possible that it wasn't as bad as I remember it.
